Saturday, April 7, 2012

Whooping Cough Vaccine Failure: Are The Vaccinated at Higher Risk?

This is my response to some recent articles showing the failure of the DTP vaccine in older children. The vaccine has been shown to wear off after some time, but are vaccinated children actually at higher risk of developing clinical whooping cough (pertussis) than the unvaccinated?

As you will see, the vaccine protects only against clinical disease, not against subclinical (mild) disease or infection, and the vaccinated can serve as reservoirs to spread disease. The result is that over the years, whooping cough deaths in infants, who are most at risk of dying from this infection, have steadily risen over the past decades. This demonstrates that vaccinating older children and adults will never serve to protect the most vulnerable and will actually put them at greater risk, as the vaccinated continue to spread disease to them.

While the vaccine does offer some protection, this has to be weighed against the risk of SIDS and other adverse effects caused by the vaccine, such as encephalitis which can lead to brain damage, autoimmune disease from the injection of foreign animal proteins, and toxicity from and overload of aluminum adjuvant.